If ministers don't crack down on gambling, we'll know money talks louder than the cries of the addicts, writes CLAIRE FOGES

Childhood is a time for fun activities, freedom and for learning about the world — and increasingly, it seems, it’s a time to make a quick buck online, too.

The bleak truth is that Britain’s hugely successful gambling industry, which sits like a parasite leeching money and hope out of the country’s poorest communities, is ensnaring more and more youngsters in its net.

A staggering 25,000 children aged 11-16 are believed to be regular gamblers — with 36,000 more at risk.

The bleak truth is that Britain’s hugely successful gambling industry, which sits like a parasite leeching money and hope out of the country’s poorest communities. File pic

Hang on, you cry: isn’t gambling for under-18s meant to be illegal? Yes, in theory. In practice, the kids find their way around it. According to the Gambling Commission, six per cent of 11 to 15-year-olds have gambled online using their parents’ accounts.

The betting companies do not seem entirely unaware of this. Many of their games appear suspiciously child-friendly: all cartoons, bright colours and cutesy characters.

Paddy Power offers a Peter Pan game with bets starting at 20p. Frozen Fruits is the William Hill offering that you can play for just 30p.

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What’s more, some games don’t even require age verification and can be played ‘for fun’. A bit like a ten-year-old might sample a can of Special Brew ‘for fun’, I suppose.

Relentless

Gambling is becoming more and more normalised for our children — that first bet as much a rite of passage as the first kiss or first driving lesson — because of the relentless advertising, promotions and cunning marketing tools used by the industry to hook people — of any age.

Even the boss of a major betting firm, Ladbrokes Coral, concedes that there may be ‘too much’ gambling advertising on TV. Indeed, it has become, rather horrifyingly, the wallpaper of our lives.

Even the boss of a major betting firm, Ladbrokes Coral, concedes that there may be ‘too much’ gambling advertising on TV. Jim Mullen is pictured in May 2016

Yes, there are rules about showing gambling ads only after the watershed — but there are exceptions to those rules, such as live sporting fixtures. A recent investigation by the Mail found that youngsters watching live football games are exposed to a flurry of gambling ads.

Of the 26 live matches shown over Christmas, for example, all had at least five commercials for betting firms running before, during and after the matches.

In one fixture — Crystal Palace v Arsenal on December 28 — there were 23 gambling advertisements.

Overall, a shocking 90 per cent of these ads were shown before the 9pm watershed.

Just think of the powerful message this sends to the millions of children and young people obsessed with football.

Aged 11, I was one of them. I was an avid Arsenal fan and throughout the 1992/93 season went to as many games as I could, idolising Ian Wright and David Seaman.

Shame

To me these were not men, but titans. I hero-worshipped them — just as children today worship Chelsea’s Eden Hazard and Harry Kane of Spurs.

So how tawdry it is that the beautiful game has leapt into bed with this ugly industry.

For kids watching today, half-time is not when you grab a snack but when that patron saint of tough nuts, Ray Winstone, the frontman for the most successful of all online betting companies, bet365, bellows at you to get a bet on quick: ‘Come on laaaaaads! A tenner on Sergio Aguero to score next at 3-1!’

At post-match interviews, managers and players speak in front of a wall of gambling logos. Then there’s the sponsorship, with nine out of 20 Premier League club shirts emblazoned with names like Fun88, Dafabet and Bet365.

Clubs see no shame in it and eschew any sense of responsibility. Several top sides have posted pictures on their websites of their youth players —some as young as 15 — in shirts with betting company logos.

The infiltration of live sport in this way, the cutesy games the betting companies offer, the ‘free play’ introductions to gambling aimed at getting people hooked, suggests the cynical exploitation of children.

Of course, capitalism has always included selling people a dream to encourage the parting of cash. But what is happening in modern Britain when the carrot of easy money is being dangled so aggressively in front of children?

Some might scoff at my concern, remembering their own childhood flutters on the Grand National. But gambling is no soft addiction. It is not the harmless cousin of alcoholism and drug addiction.

Gambling addiction eats through the financial security of families like a cancer. It wrecks lives, drives people to suicide. There are regular stories of young men in particular who are so ashamed of the debts they have run up that they see no other way out.

It’s a problem that has become dramatically worse in recent years — as an age-old vice has been super-charged by modern technology.

Now that you can have a flutter on your phone 24 hours a day, the itch to bet overpowers more people each year.

Paddy Power (file photo) offers a Peter Pan game with bets starting at 20p. Frozen Fruits is the William Hill offering that you can play for just 30p

The Gambling Commission, which regulates the industry, estimates that more than two million are either problem gamblers or at risk of addiction. Around 430,000 suffer from a serious habit.

Now that children are being primed to start betting hard as soon as they come of age (or earlier, if they can use their parents’ details), we are looking at a ticking time-bomb of addiction, all to fill the coffers of Britain’s grasping betting companies. The founder of bet365 was the UK’s highest paid boss last year, pocketing more than £200 million.

Companies will hustle as hard as the law and the regulations allow — which is why the finger of blame must point at the ones who let this happen: our politicians.

First there was New Labour, whose Gambling Act of 2005 created a free-for-all in gambling and allowed betting shops to proliferate in poor areas.

We can thank Tony Blair for the fact that those ghastly fixed-odds betting terminals — so addictive they have been likened to crack cocaine — tend to cluster in places of high unemployment (just a hop, skip and a jump from getting your benefit cheque to losing it!).

While the rot set in with Labour, we’ve had nearly eight years of Conservative Government since and barely a finger has been lifted to deal with the rapacious gambling industry.

The Prime Minister likes to talk about fixing the ‘burning injustices’ in society, well, Mrs May, what about the injustice of a multi-billion-pound industry sucking the hope out of our worst-off communities?

What about the kiddie-friendly offerings that get children hooked on the dopamine rush of winning?

What about the way the data of punters is harvested in order to target the poorest and bombard them with ads?

Epidemic

Yes, there are the tax revenues to consider, but there’s a huge cost to the state, too, in dealing with the fall-out of family breakdown and the crime and mental health issues associated with problem gambling. The bill for Britain’s gambling epidemic is estimated at £1.16 billion a year.

So please, no more empty words from ministers on standing up to the strong on behalf of the weak.

The Government must grow a spine, and not only deliver on a promised crackdown on fixed-odds betting terminals, but also ban gambling advertising as it has with tobacco, radically reduce the reach of sponsorship in sport, limit the stakes allowed online, outlaw child-friendly games and put the grasping betting companies on notice.

One thing’s for sure: if the Government continues to sit on its hands, we can only conclude that money talks more loudly than the cries of the young and the addicted.